A brand new iOS social wellness app known as Exist needs to assist middle-aged shoppers join and construct significant communities with each other as they navigate their lives and the stresses that include it.
The app describes itself because the edgier cousin of Calm or Headspace, and its fundamental function is social journaling. The thought behind the app’s social and community-driven journaling is to assist individuals heal collectively, reasonably than alone. Exist additionally incorporates a every day temper tracker, audio workouts, guided meditations, and extra.
The app was based by iOS developer Jason Jardim, who beforehand based a startup known as Lounge, and Alicia Waldner, who’s the founder a advertising company known as ADventure Advertising.
The co-founders didn’t meet at a networking occasion, a job, or their alma maters. They met on a date. The 2 remained pleasant and obtained to speaking about concepts for a psychological well being app — a subject they have been each enthusiastic about, Waldner mentioned in an interview with TechCrunch.
Waldner had attended a collection of group psychological wellness experiences, and had heard from individuals who have been seeking to have these kinds of community-based experiences at house. Jardim and Waldner got down to create an app that may embody this community-building concept.
Whereas Exist was initially meant to focus on Gen Z customers, the premise ended up resonating with middle-aged customers, as the common age of customers who signed up for the app was 40. The duo then determined to focus and middle the app round this older group.
Exist incorporates a TikTok-like feed that permits customers to swipe by means of a mixture of movies and textual content posts that includes individuals’s public journals and their responses to every day prompts. Customers can share feedback on these posts to share comparable experiences or provide help and recommendation.
“The most important function that makes us completely different is the neighborhood facet,” Waldner mentioned. “Headspace and Calm proved that there’s this audio-based market, however individuals nonetheless really feel very alone in these experiences and in actual life, individuals meditate after which they journal, however that’s a solo expertise. And what we did was make {that a} social expertise. So as a substitute of journaling all of your ideas and emotions at house and placing it beneath your mattress at night time, you’re sharing it with the world, and individuals are commenting again.”
Exist additionally options an AI-powered query function that prompts customers to broaden on their journals and discover extra of their ideas and emotions. Waldner says the function is supposed to assist individuals resolve their points and permit them to assume deeper about one thing.
The neighborhood and social journaling facets of Exist are free. If customers need entry to guided audios and meditations, they want to enroll in the app’s $5.99 month-to-month subscription.
By way of the long run, the startup needs to proceed leaning into the human connection side of Exist and search for manner to enhance it. Exist additionally needs so as to add further options round logging your sleeping habits and feelings, together with extra customized prompts for journals.
